Poker, novel-in-progress, and updates from rainy PDX.

Monday, June 07, 2004

I gotta say, I am about to go back to No-Limit. I have been running bad at limit for the past 5,000 hands or so, and it's no fun.

This is just the most recent bad beat I've endured.

I'm on the button with AhTh. Normally, I'd limp here, but there was only one other limper, and the $.50/$1.00 tables on Stars are notoriously tight. So I raise, hoping to isolate the limper.

I do so, and the flop is Qh Ad 8s. Limper checks, I bet and she calls.

Turn is 7s. Limper checks, I bet and she calls.

River is Ts. Now, this puts three spades on the board, but it also gives me a two-pair, Aces and Tens. I put the limper on a worse Ace or maybe a Queen. But now I'm thinking, even if she limped and cold called with something like AK, I just beat her kicker with my two pair.

She checks to me, I bet, she raises. I obviously can't fold now, and I suspect that she might be falsely representing the flush. I mean, she could have been chasing the flush even though she only had a 3-flush on the flop, but I didn't think it was likely.

So I re-raise. She caps, and now I have the feeling that I'm going to lose the hand.

Of course, I'm right. She turns over Js 9s for a straight flush. The bitch backdoored a straight flush!

On the flop, she had a gutshot straight against two overcards. The pot was only $2.75, so she certainly wasn't getting pot odds. Of course she calls.

On the turn, she's got a 4-flush, but still doesn't have pot odds for the call.

The river was, well, her lucky day.

For a less depressing story, check out Guinness and Poker right now. There's a great write-up from a guy who sat next to Phil Hellmuth in last week's WSOP. Funny stuff.

In the meantime, I've almost lost all the money I built playing $0.01/$0.02 NL ring games on Stars!

I seriously might need to go back to NL.

1 Comments:

Blogger James said...

Like you, I've been working on building a bankroll to move up in limits. I just started playing at Stars to clear the 25% bonus. Boy are those tables tight! No wonder you're having trouble making any headway. I subscribe to the idea that at low limits you're mostly profiting from opponents' mistakes, and at Stars they don't seem to make enough of them. I don't care for the maniacal looseness of Party's .50/$1 tables, but there is a happy medium. The .25/.50 tables at Absolute are very soft, and Paradise seems to have looser .50/$1 games than Stars at night and on weekends. My hope is that Stars will become looser once the "ESPN Raymer effect" brings in new players.
--JD

June 8, 2004 at 7:27 AM

 

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